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So today I came across the website Twisted Sifter, an Australian image blog that has some great finds. This is one of them – police photos from the 20′s, 30′s and 40′s around Sydney and New South Wales.

Today was such a nice day; the sun came out (it’s been rainy for weeks), the temperature rose (mid 70′s!), and I found myself with some time to do something creative. I haven’t had my camera out since before Christmas, so I came up with a little plan for myself. I’m going to try to take at least one picture a day.

Hopefully there will be one interesting picture each day, but a picture there will be nonetheless. We’ll see how long I can stick with it. So for today’s photo, I went into the woods behind my house and started shooting in black and white. This is something I never do – I figure why not shoot in color, then convert to b&w in photoshop? But I realized I am shooting myself in the foot by trying to preserve the color – I can be more creative if I’m doing something different. Anyway, it occurred to me that the EOS 450D, when in RAW+JPG mode, captures the color in the raw anyway. Bonus!

Here is one of my own images. I like minimalist images, especially if there is an unknown element to them. What is the number nine signifying here? Why was it printed so large? Who was intended to see this? Who put it there? All kinds of questions can be asked about this image.

The SX-70 is a fascinating little camera made by Polaroid back in the early 70′s. One of the things that makes this camera interesting is that the film it uses, Time-Zero, can be manipulated after the picture is taken using your fingers or other things like pencils or toothbrushes. Even without the manipulation, the film has a unique look to it – strangely tinted skies and color-cast subjects, with a hazy, unfocused look combine for an overall effect – dark, ethereal and morose, almost archaic. Today, there are still people using the SX-70 to create these heavily artistic images that take you back to a time when the world was a little more innocent, yet much much stranger and exotic, with shadowed mysteries around every corner and things you wonder about all around.

Here is a shot by tobysx70 on flickr that demonstrates the photo manipulation technique.

Here’s a nice shot of London done with Time Zero film.

It really is amazing to me how creative you can get when the technology in your hands is limited; would I get a shot that conveys as much emotion and feeling as the above if I was using my crystal clear Canon EOS? I wonder what would happen if I took the shot with an SX-70, with its dirty rollers and its inclination to distort and discolor the image as it develops. I have an SX-70 with one pack of Time-Zero film. That’s ten exposures. I wonder what I should shoot with them.

Wayne Belger is, among other things, a photographer. But he doesn’t just grab his twelve megapixel high-end digital camera to shoot. He builds his own. And when I say he builds his own cameras, you better believe he goes the extra mile to make each camera unusual and extraordinary. You see, his pinhole cameras are not just a box with a hole in one end and photo paper in the other – he builds each one out of materials that relate to the subject he will be shooting. For instance, when he shoots underwater, sea creatures and shells adorn the camera he builds. Shooting Asian refugees, he built a camera using a 500 year old Tibetan Lama skull.

Wayne is one of the most artistic, expressive people that I’ve come across so far. His site – the images of the cameras, the images taken with the cameras themselves – are well worth viewing. But be warned – some of them are dark, disturbing, and grotesque, just like the cameras themselves. Do not take what you see lightly.

Here are a few shots I did on the night of my birthday. It was around 2:30 am. I had gotten off work and headed up to a place called Northwest, where I knew of some nice open fields that I might be able to set up nearby and get some nice sky shots with meteors (the Leonid meteor shower occurs every year on the 12th of August). I didn’t find a good spot – the field were all grown over, so I headed back to Leland with the camera in the driver seat and just started snapping this way and that way to see what would turn up. I think this series tells a pretty interesting story.